back in the '60s. I'm from WV, and Jay Rockefeller was one of them. The rural poverty--rural is not really the right word because of the many coal towns that had been ravished and abandoned, as well as the people up in the hollows who had never had a chance since the day they were born--uncovered caused upheavals in some academic and legislative circles. It was what allowed me, a middle-class girl from Charleston, to receive financial aid to a fancy northern college, and was a centerpiece, briefly, of the War on Poverty.
Legislators eventually lost interest, and my relatives in Minden, a coal mine town (and you have to understand that this was a town built by mine owners to house coal miners which ended up isolating them and their families when the mines closed (and "house" is just part of it; stores, churches, civic halls, etc. were part of the deal) far from any sort of help much less prosperity, as well as the railroad towns like Hinton, once a bustling little almost cosmopolitan town, which suffered a lesser fate, but still failed.
I'm glad attention is again being focused on these parts of the USA, but I despair of any real solution to the problem. I've really lost hope for my state, falling into oxycontin addiction and horrible racism.
I do have to credit Jay Rockefeller, however, for his genuine and lasting devotion to helping the people of WV. From poverty worker he moved into state government and then to the US Senate. He spent the rest of his political life trying to help WV; he was no "carpet bagger," which the Republicans in the state tried to make him out to be. He stuck with us.
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